Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

Last time out, in the entry headed "Impeachment: Are We There Yet?," I presented a rough sketch of a claim that President Trump is impeachable right now.  I readily admitted that it wasn't complete: that I myself didn't really think I had proven my case.  Furthermore I said I would not, in the near future, attempt to make it complete.  I promised that I would, in the following entry (this one), give my reasons why I don't plan to do that.

Events have intervened, so that my plans have partly changed: I now intend to fulfill, in this entry, only part of that promise.  As recently as two days ago, my intention was to list as many as four reasons "why not."  But as it turns out, I will list only one of them, leaving the others for another time.

By the way, the one reason I will mention today is the one that I was planning to mention first.  So without further ado, here it is.

Reason One: The Nuclear Thing Takes Priority

By "the nuclear thing," I mean the position that I took, principally in http://edelsont.dreamwidth.org/2160.html, to the following effect: Congress needs to pass a law saying that, absent a declaration of war (or similar Congressional authorization), the president may not order the "first use" of nuclear weapons.  "First use" means attacking with nuclear weapons, other than in response to a prior nuclear attack by the enemy.

And what do I mean when I say of this "thing" that it "takes priority"?  I mean that Congress needs to attend to it first, because the need for it is greater, and more urgent.  Once they have protected us from nuclear war, then we can allow them to move on to the fun stuff, like impeaching Trump.

That's really all that needs to be said, under the heading of stating "reason one," and offering some justification for it.  One might ask, however: what made me change my mind?  Why did I decide to present only "reason one" today, when I had been intending to include three more reasons in the same journal entry?

The short answer to that: in my view, over the last few days, the "nuclear thing" has gotten even more urgent.  So I want to post something fast, and not to dilute the impression that it makes.

Okay then; what has happened to make me say that this issue has gotten [even] more urgent than it already was?  For one thing, North Korea has tested another ballistic missile.  And so it seems likely that the Trump administration is now engaged in deciding what, if anything, should be done in response.  Military responses (perhaps among others) are possibly being considered.

Notice that I am not taking a position as to whether a military response should seriously be considered at this time.  For all I know, if one had all the relevant intelligence information, a reasonable person might conclude that military action is now, regrettably, necessary.

To me, though, that makes it even more important that Congress act now to prevent the one deadliest kind of military action: the first use of nuclear weapons.  That is one option which should not even be on the table.

Besides the ballistic missile test, there is one other recent development which pushes my thoughts in the same direction.  (Well, maybe more than one; but one can stand in for the others.)  This one is different in that it has no obvious connection with the subject of nuclear weapons.

What might that be?  Why, the "Access Hollywood" tape, of course!  (I am kidding about the "of course" part, but only about that.)  More specifically, I am referring to the fact, which has only recently been published, that President Trump is now denying that the tape is real: denying that he even said those regrettable things, such as the bit about grabbing women by the feline parts.  (When the tape first came to light, he didn't deny saying it, and in fact he made a sincere-sounding apology for doing so.  He only denied actually doing the things that he boasted about on the tape.)

Here's a link to a one-day-old New York Times story about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html.

You may be thinking: yes, Trump seems to be unmoored from the truth on that one.  But so what?  It's not like that's anything new.  How can I claim that this relatively trivial thing is important enough to affect such a weighty matter as a law on the first use of nuclear weapons?

A fair question.  I certainly do agree that there's nothing new or surprising about Donald Trump's saying something that isn't true.  However, this one feels different.  The difference isn't in the intrinsic importance of the subject matter; it's in what this particular untruth seems to say about the mental state of the man who uttered it.

Ironically, you see, what's so disturbing about this one is that it doesn't sound like a lie.  It sounds, instead, like a delusion, and I don't mean that metaphorically; I mean a full-blown, psychotic delusion.  (I am not a mental health professional, but I do have some experience with such phenomena.  By all means, let's get some shrinks to weigh in on this.)

Why does this particular departure from reality seem, to me, more like a delusion than like a lie?  My best guess: because it sounds like a man who is not even trying to check his notions against the facts.  And, perhaps an even stronger indication of this: he also doesn't sound like he's even pretending to try.  When he makes such a statement, having previously said the opposite, the impression I get is that the question "But is it true?" just never arises in his mind.  It's as if the very possibility of asking that question is outside his realm of awareness.

Which scares you more, a man who lies or a man with delusions?  I rather think that that depends on the context.  If you are negotiating a business deal or a tax bill, lying might prove the greater obstacle to a satisfactory result.  The motivating force behind a lie is what the liar wants someone else to believe.

What if, instead, the subject of concern is the president, and he is currently engaged in deciding whether to order a nuclear attack?  Then "what he wants someone else to believe" doesn't enter into it.  At least not under the present state of the law, where there is no constraint on his power to decide as he chooses ... including, in particular, no requirement that anyone else concur with his decision.

In that situation, what is, instead, relevant is what he himself believes -- at the moment.  Has he convinced himself that all the people in North Korea are engaged, right now, in a magical working which will, if not immediately stopped, throw the planet out of its orbit?  Then his decision will be based on that, exactly as if it were real.

And that's why Donald Trump's recent denials of the reality of the Access Hollywood tape scare the hell out of me.  And out of you too, I hope.  Let's get this man's finger off the nuclear trigger.

I ended my previous journal entry by posing an apparent dilemma: the American people might want to voice their opinions on President Trump's plans with regard to North Korea, but are inhibited from doing so by the fact that we don't know what those plans are.  I refer specifically to his plans about attacking North Korea with lots of nuclear weapons: has he already decided to do this?  If not, what sort of "provocation" from the North Koreans would lead him to do it?

What a mess.  It does seem -- doesn't it? -- that, without more information, we have no opportunity to formulate a meaningful opinion, let alone to express it.

Oh, wait.  I have an idea.  I previously answered the predictive questions with "We just don't know, full stop"; but maybe that isn't entirely correct.  As I said, I don't think that there's any basis for saying what kind of military action against North Korea we will probably get, if any.  Nor, for that matter, even for stating the likelihood of a massive nuclear attack in terms of a numerical probability.  But ....

Maybe what Trump previously said, and what we think he meant, is not, after all, entirely irrelevant in this context.  Suppose that I am right in my conclusion about that; suppose, at the very least, that Mr. Trump knows, by now, that many people think he was talking about dropping lots of nuclear bombs.  And further suppose, since he hasn't issued a clarification, that he doesn't mind having a great many people thinking that.  Does that really tell us nothing whatever about what he might actually do?

Now that I come to think of it, no.  It does tell us something: not something that can usefully be expressed as a numerical probability, but something about how we ought to act in the face of our present uncertainty.  Namely, that we ought not entirely to ignore the possibility of a massive nuclear attack; that we would not be wasting our time in expressing our views as to whether that would be a good thing.

And so I shall: it would be a very bad thing.  (No surprise there: I've previously stated this view.)

But, you might think, it is indeed a waste of time to express that opinion.  Not because the possibility is negligible that Trump would take such action ... but because there's nothing we can do about it.  He is, after all, the president; under current law, he is clearly empowered to order a massive nuclear attack.  We can protest all we want; he can ignore us.  And let's further suppose, if only "for the sake of the argument," that he almost certainly will.

Did you notice the phrase, "under current law"?  That, dear reader, is the key; it is the reason why, even under these pessimistic assumptions, we need not count ourselves powerless.  We can ask Congress to change the law.  And, whatever you may think of the chances that they will do so, I submit that the stakes are high enough that it is certainly worthwhile to attempt it.

Okay, let's further suppose that we're all agreed that Congress should change the law.  But change it to what?  It turns out that several bills on the subject have already been introduced in this Congress; they seem to fall into two groups.

The first group is procedural in nature.  They say that the decision to launch a nuclear strike should not be in the hands of the President alone: that, for example, the concurrence of the Secretery of Defense and/or Secretery of State should be required.

The second group of bills does not address the "who," that is, which officials need to assent to a strike.  Instead, it focuses more directly on the "what."  These bills say: the President may not order a "first strike": that is, may not order a nuclear strike except in response to a prior nuclear strike by a hostile power.  Or rather, that the President may not do so unless Congress has declared war.

Both types of proposals have some merit; either would be preferable to what we have now.  But I prefer the second approach, a straightforward limit on what may be done: no first use.

In so saying, I reveal that, for me, this isn't just about Donald Trump.  His loose talk, and indications of his mental instability, have done a lot to bring the issue to our attention.  But now that it has come to our attention, I realize that I already had a clear conviction about this.  I believe that our nuclear weapons have no legitimate purpose other than deterring others from attacking us with the same sort of weapons.  I would prefer to live in a world in which no other use for them is even considered.

And it is, indeed, a matter of choosing the sort of world in which we prefer to live.  There is no way to prove, purely by facts and reason, what the right choice is.

Now let's assume, just for a bit, that we're all agreed on this, too: we favor a "no first use of nuclear weapons" law.  I just want to mention that, even within this space, there are details to be worked out as to what the law should say.  I already gave a slightly expanded gloss of what "no first use" means to me: that, absent a declaration of war by Congress, the President "may not order a nuclear strike except in response to a prior nuclear strike by a hostile power."  But this still leaves open lots of questions; a few of them follow, but it isn't a complete list.

What is a "hostile power"?  Does it need to be a nation?  If not, I think that presents a difficulty with the "declaration of war" part: it is my impression that, as a matter of international law, war can be declared only against a recognized nation-state.

Perhaps, then, "declaration of war", in our proposed "no first use" law, should be changed to some other form of Congressional authorization.  There might be other reasons for this, too.  In fact, this opens the way for a sort of compromise: the more open-ended the language used to describe the required sort of Congressional authorization, the more you are still preserving, even under the new law, some potential flexibility for the executive.

Similarly, how much effective flexibility you are leaving to the executive also depends on how the law defines "in response to a prior nuclear strike."  We're now talking about what the President will be authorized to do without Congressional authorization.  Is retaliation allowed only after at least one warhead has actually exploded?  My guess is that military leaders would advise against this.  But then, how is the President to determine that a nuclear strike against us (or, of course, our allies) has already been set in motion?  Should the law spell out what kind of evidence to that effect the President is required to have, in order legally to order a counterattack?  To this particular question, I do not propose an answer; I merely raise it.

On the other hand, I am not shy about expressing an opinion about the following: mere threats of a nuclear strike against us are not enough to justify a nuclear strike in return.  Not even if we also knew that the hostile power in question had the capability to carry out its threats.  "No first use," to me, means that the United States shall not attack with nuclear weapons unless our leaders have good reason to believe that a hostile power has, at least, attempted to use them against us.

I will make one more such suggestion about the details of the hypothetical "no first use" law.  Among the belligerent utterances by North Korean officials, one that stands out in the memory is the statement that they might "test" a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  (I believe that the official in question even specified that he was talking about a hydrogen bomb.)

In the above, I put "test" in quotation marks because we might not be willing to accept the description of this action as merely a test.  Since the North Koreans brought this possibility up, those drafting a "no first use" law for the United States might want to consider specifying that such a detonation would constitute a "first use" within the meaning of the act: that the President would be allowed to consider it to be a nuclear attack against the United States and its allies.

It would be, in actual effect and regardless of the stated intentions, an attack against the whole world.  Because, you know, of the radioactive fallout: a physical phenomenon which kills lots of people, and it is impossible to predict how many, nor where.

I am not, however, actually advocating that such language be included in the "no first use" law; I am just raising the possibility.  I defer to the judgment of the members of Congress, with the advice of their staffs, on the nuts and bolts of drafting a bill.  And particularly, quite importantly in an example like this one, I recognize that they have to consider what version of a bill can actually get passed.

By the same token, it is possible that a "no first use" bill could not pass, but one of the more "procedural" proposals could.  If so, by all means pass that: as I already said, either kind of constraint would be preferable to the present situation, in which the law places no explicit constraint at all on the President's ability to order a nuclear strike.

And yet, I shall offer one more consideration in favor of "no first use," as opposed to a procedural measure.  This argument is political, in the sense that it deals with the question of what kind of bill can get passed.

Namely: I submit that the bill's chance might very well be enhanced by the fact that its proponents can claim, truthfully, that this is not fundamentally about Donald Trump.  They can say that, now that their attention has been drawn to the matter, they realize that this should have been done a long time ago.  Suppose that you believe that no such law is necessary under President Trump, because he would never order a first strike anyway.  You still might want to consider the possibility that some future POTUS might not be so worthy of this trust.

In other words, compared to proposals which just modify the decision procedures, "no first use" offers more cover to Republicans in Congress, and others who have reason to be concerned about the reactions of pro-Trump voters.  Politically, the problem with the purely procedural ideas is that they don't support that kind of claim very well.  They make it almost impossible to avoid giving the impression that what this bill is "really saying" is that we don't trust this particular President.

Of course, many of us, myself included, really don't trust him.  I suppose that's the fundamental reason why I keep coming back to this point: virtually any kind of constraint on the use of nuclear weapons would be better than the current lack of constraints.

Those who really, really don't trust President Trump might be tempted to feel that there is no point in passing such a law, since Trump could ignore it.  But if you're suffering under that temptation, here's something else to think about: what about the people who receive the President's order for a nuclear strike, and whose job it is to carry out that order?  If an explicit "no first use" law were on the books, and President Trump (or any president) ignored that law, those people would have clear legal grounds for refusing the order.  And so they would be more likely actually to refuse it.

And there I rest my case.  Congress, it's time for y'all to get on with it.